Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, is to announce a new crackdown on
problem parents who fail to "face up to their responsibilities" by ensuring
children attend school on time

Parents will be punished for failing to ensure children turn up to school "ready to learn and showing respect for their teacher” under plans to be outlined by Michael Gove.

The Education Secretary will say today that hard-line measures are needed to crackdown on parents who fail to “face up to their responsibilities”.

Full details of the reform package will be outlined later this year but the Telegraph has learnt that it will include docking child benefit payments from parents of habitual truants.

The move – which has previously been blocked by the Liberal Democrats – is designed to create a bigger incentive for parents to send their children to school and make the current system of fines more efficient.

Parents are already fined £60 – rising to £120 if it is not paid within 21 days – but it is feared that large numbers of families fail to take the penalty seriously. Figures show more than 20,000 fines were unpaid last year.

The crackdown comes on top of other policies designed to keep children in school, including a ban schools condoning two weeks term time leave to allow families to take cheap holidays.

The reforms will be outlined in a speech to the Policy Exchange think-tank in London on Saturday.

In the address, Mr Gove will also hit back at critics of his controversial GCSE reforms, accusing them of setting children up to fail and “shying away from anything which might require grit”.

He will round on the left-wing educational establishment, saying they want to feed pupils "a diet of dumbed-down courses” and prevent them studying a broad sweep of English literature.

But some of Mr Gove’s toughest words will be reserved for parents themselves.

He will say that poor behaviour is still one of the biggest causes of teachers leaving the profession before retirement.

The Government has already introduced a series of reforms, including abolishing the power of independent appeals panels to overturn exclusions and scrapping “ridiculous no-touch” policies that prevent teachers physically restraining violent pupils.

But he says there is “more to do” on truancy, which is likely to include docking benefits of parents who allow children to skip school. This follows the publication of figures showing that as many as 20,000 fines for truancy go unpaid every year.

“We need to ensure that those parents who don’t play their part in ensuring their children attend school, ready to learn and showing respect for their teacher, face up to their responsibilities,” he says. “We will, later this year, be outlining detailed proposals to ensure parents play their full part in guaranteeing good behaviour and outlining stronger sanctions for those who don’t.”

The comments come at the end of a difficult few weeks for Mr Gove that has seen him heavily criticised over a shake-up of GCSEs in English literature.

Under new changes, all courses for 14- to 16-year-olds must cover a series of core subjects to ensure pupils get access to a diverse range of literature. This includes one Shakespeare play, a Victorian novel, Romantic poetry and modern British fiction.

But the move has led to exam boards scrapping all non-British novels from GCSE syllabuses, with books such as Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird being dropped from 2015 onwards.

Some academics have insisted it puts too much focus on 19th century British authors at the expense of world literature.

In his speech, Mr Gove will hit back at his critics, including those who are opposed to the English Baccalaureate – a league table measure that ranks performance in the core subjects.

“We have university academics… saying that we should not introduce 15 and 16-year-old children to Charles Dickens because his work will put them off literature for life,” he says.

“We have political opponents who argue that expecting 16 year olds to get GCSEs in English, maths, science, a language and one of the humanities is creating a barrier to success and setting up children to fail.”

He says he spent the first four months of his life in care and knows “what setting children up to fail looks like”.

Mr Gove adds: “It’s sending working class children to school without daring to think they might be intellectually curious and capable of greatness, denying them access to anything stretching or ambitious, setting expectations so low you can never be surprised by someone’s potential.”

He also claims poor education is characterised by “giving children flimsy photocopied worksheets instead of proper rigorous textbooks, feeding them a diet of dumbed-down courses and easy to acquire qualifications, lowering pass marks and inflating grades to give the illusion of progress, shying away from anything which might require grit, application, hard work and perseverance and then sending these poor children into the adult world without the knowledge, skills, character and accomplishments they need, and deserve, to flourish.”